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I was delighted to receive the latest communications in our continuing long distance discussion about the enuresis question (second in importance I would suggest only to the Jewish question). Since your letters were parallel but in some ways divergent (is this possible?), I shall address comments to each of them.
To Victor:
It is true that you do not say explicity that the patients' castration anxiety caused their enuresis. You do introduce the intervening variable of the split in the ego as a 'archaic mode of magical thought'. However, you do say, on page 298, that your patient 'viewed the possible consequences of such presumptuous competition; i.e. tangible evidence of castration. In such circumstances then, he was "ripe" for a fetishistic experience … it was as if he could reassure himself that he was not castrated as long as he could produce a urinary stream …' Later on that page you say 'virtually all of these boys showed severe—more than expectable—castration anxiety as well as a tendency to cope with this anxiety by a split in the ego of the sort we have been discussing'. Further, on page 301 you say, 'under the particular circumstances of a regression this archaic mode of thinking is revived and used in the service of defense'. All this is, I think, tantamount to saying that castration anxiety generates a regression to a primitive mode of functioning, which includes the split in the ego you describe and the enuresis which you believe is associated with it.
I am amazed that you are amazed at my remarks about reconstruction. Surely you are aware that there is considerable discussion in the literature in recent years about the status of reconstruction as a means of obtaining veridical historical data. As Ed Weinshel has himself said, 'At times one has the impression that those factors which the patient emphasizes are really "red herrings" that are invoked to provide causality and a sense of mastery'. Earlier, Kris and more recently Schafer have spoken ab